1. art and entertainment
2. books and literature

HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
FOREWORD: THE FULL URSUS
BEAR ROOTS ORAL HISTORY:
A PIONEER MAPS THE GENOME OF BEAR
Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.
Fr
ck
Ja
©
Belly up to the bar, boys, and reset your time lines, cuz Papa Bear’s back in town and been asked
to “’fess up the facts o’ life” about your Bearstreaming “Bear Roots.” Complementing Les
Wright’s analytical and anecdotal Bear Book II in your hand, this pioneer informant, like Michael
Bronski, has “been there/done that dolce vita” in gay popular culture as well as in gay liberation,
in gay writing (fiction and feature articles), and in gay video and photography. Les Wright asked
me to be keynote speaker at the Bear History Project Conference 2000, because my street
credential–6,000 gay pages in print–is as one of the keystone voices in the creation of the species
Bear. This turnkey information is the thirty-five years of acts, facts, and personalities detailed in
this Foreword which is not post-factum academic theory, but is the witness of one writer in the
right place at the right time doing the right stuff to define the “species bear” within the “genus
homosexuality” from the first days of gay liberation through the millennium. Once, in early 1993,
I was actually on Oprah talking about women’s blue-collar husbands’ taste for bearish gay sex!
MAPPING THE GENOME FOR BEAR BOOK II
its
om
.c
er
ch
As the most published author in Bear magazine, I can write channeling the “Bear Voice”
as in the first line above, as well as in three of the five Bear Annuals, 1997, 1999, 2000; or, I can
write as a university professor with a Ph.D. in literature and criticism, channeling the academic
voice of the “discursive entropy of blah blah.” Because in 1967, I was a founding member of the
legit American Popular Culture Association, I had two years’ head-start in pop-culture analysis
before Stonewall; so I was prepared to anticipate queers, leather, bears, whatever, as the phenoms
appeared, particularly in Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. Taking cue from Les Wright’s
Bear Book II, whose poignancy and character rises from people’s voices detailing
autobiographical facts of politics and art, my documented life–vetted reportedly by no less than
the Mapplethorpe Foundation–details pre-Stonewall education, experience, and politics typical of
the pioneers who molded Gay Lib after June 1969.
During the long hot civil-rights summer of 1962, I worked with people of color as an
activist Catholic seminarian in the projects on the South Side of Chicago with labor-organizer
Saul Alinsky, once marching with Martin Luther King, and once carried bodily out of Mayor
Daley’s office by the Chicago police whose touch turned me on, though I was not out until May
15, 1967, when I came out officially with a hairy Greek named John Constant from the old Gold
Coast, 501 Clark Street. In autumn, 1967, I was a university professor graduated from the
Summer of Love, with a doctorate from Loyola University of Chicago, the “heartland home of
leather.” In May, 1968, in the balcony of the Biltmore Theatre, New York, I sat as a critic on
assignment for the Journal of Popular Culture witnessing one of the opening performances of
the all-important period-musical, Hair: The American Tribal Love Rock Musical, whose fetishempowered title song every bear, particularly Bear Book II’s Bear-A-Tones (Chapter 15), might
study, adopt, and sing as the Bear Anthem.
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
“GIMME DOWN TO THERE, HAIR!”
ck
Ja
©
In August 1968, when cops were “pigs” not “bears,” I was in Chicago’s Lincoln Park
working the anti-Vietnam protests during the police riot at the Democratic Convention. In May
1969, in Paris still smouldering with student revolution, then in Amsterdam, I was swept up, like
Vanessa Redgrave’s Isadora (1969), by a lovely, bearded, revolutionary boy named Nick
Perrenet, straight out of the leathery Argos Bar (the world’s first leather bar) and into the chairthrowing, shouting maelstrom of students taking over a Dutch University. I didn’t understand
Dutch, but the choreography of revolution was absolutely familiar from my campus in the States.
In June 1969, I exited a Janis Joplin concert stoned to hear Judy Garland had died. (One person’s
history is coat-hook to everybody’s history.) Earlier that same June, tripping with iconic leatherpriest, Jim Kane, on two Harley-Davidsons through the mountains–and mountainmen–from
Denver to Taos and Santa Fe, I ritually wore, for one glorious evening, Ken Kesey’s brown
leather jacket–with all that fetish implies–while floating in a desert pond.
GAY RENAISSANCE 1969-1982: EMERGING BEARS
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
On July 4, 1969, I met my first of three significant-other bears in Chuck Renslow’s new
Gold Coast Bar. He was a 6-2, 190-pound, 23-year-old cub with a strawberry-blond crewcut and
moustache. I marched straight up to him and spit in his face. His name was David Sparrow and
we became wild, passionate leather-lovers for eight years, shooting together the earliest
Bearstream covers of Drummer 21, 25, and 30. (See David Sparrow in bondage in “Honeymoon”
photograph, American Men, p. 37.) Dr. Thomas McCann (Chapter 28) characterizes latter-day
90’s bear fiction out of what are 70’s early themes, vocabulary, and physical attributes. In 1972,
inspired by five-years of S&M experience and playing with Male Hide Leather’s Bob Maddox at
the first Chicago Hellfire Club Inferno runs, I wrote one of the first S&M novels, Leather Blues,
featuring two bear-themed scenes: a hairy fuck of a biker and a mountainman fistfucked.
(Leather Blues appeared again serially spreading bearishness in Son of Drummer (June 1978),
Stroke (1985), and full-length in MAN2MAN (1980-1982). Click on Les Wright: “Appendix.
Early Published Writings on Bears.” Surf to www.BearHistoryProject.com.
Fritscher Principle: the concept of “bear” is blank enough to absorb countless male
identities and fantasies. Thus inclusively, in 1970, David Sparrow and I lived triangularly
between New York, Chicago, and San Francisco where–as cameras investigated gay identity–we
were hired as bearded photo models for Whipcrack, the first West Coast leather-themed
magazine published as a one-issue trial balloon years before Drummer which appeared June 21,
1975. At the same time in 1970, I interviewed the very straight (and interestingly bearish) Pope
of the Church of Satan, the shaved head and goateed Anton LaVey, for my book Popular
Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch’s Mouth, which in 1971 was the first detailing of gay wicca
and gay spirituality, particularly as practiced by Gay High Priest, Frederick de Arechaga of
Chicago. This gay wicca and leather brought Advocate editor Mark Thompson to my kitchen
table in 1978 when I was editing Drummer and Mark Thompson was–like Candide–collecting his
studies for the Leatherstream of Leatherfolk and the Radical Fairy/Bearstream of RFD.
When Bear Book II’s Alex Papadopoulos in Chapter 12, “Theorizing Bear Space,” writes
about the varieties of “Bear Space,” consider this historical byte. The urban legend that AIDS
was brought to the U.S. by an airline steward in 1982 puts ironic frame to the fact that it was only
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
in May, 1969, a month before Stonewall, that the first jumbo jet was introduced, enabling much
of early gay liberation to be globalized on the mile-high “gay space”of planes connecting the dots
of fabled gay cities. Also feeding the Bearstream, on June 26, 1964, five years before Stonewall,
was that famous Life magazine feature article on San Francisco’s Tool Box bar, which pictured
artist Chuck Arnett’s Leatherstream-into-Bearstream drawings that fueled gay consciousness
from Arnett’s High Concept Tool Box to his actual advertising graphics for the Slot Hotel and
the Barracks Baths and the Red Star Saloon and the Ambush bar. Search for the book
Leatherfolk. Scroll down to “Arnett.”
Ja
©
THE FIRST BEARISH BAR: RAINBOW MC
UNIFORM BEARS: “PADDING OUT” WITH THE PDP
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
By 1972, the world’s first bar to turn not-yet-literally “Bear,” but spinning on the cusp of
“bearish” in the Bearstream, was San Francisco’s “The No Name” (later aka “The Brig,” “The
Powerhouse”) run by poet and cookbook author, the redheaded Ron Johnson, and bearded
photographer Mario Pirami who together in 1971 were the founders of the Rainbow Motorcycle
Club (RMC). The original-recipe Rainbows, still existing, including this old Rainbow fuck, were
the avant garde of the bearish dirty-biker look. (See The Bear Cult: Photographs by Chris
Nelson, pp. 19, 22, 40.) Like the movies, the boiling clouds of time-lapse creation hovered over
us all as gay life invented itself first as gay, second as leather, third as twinkie/clone, fourth as
bear. (Gay culture thrives on “make-overs.”) To clarify gayspeak spoken then: on Castro,
homomasculine men used twinkie and Castro Clone as synonyms. Yet, by some ironic twist of
gay DNA, the clones’ exact style of flannel shirts, bandanas, boots, etc., evolved into “Bear
Wear” first at the Ambush bar, South of Market, and later, out of the Castro bar, Bear Hollow,
riding through the millennium at the second Lone Star bar across the street from the closed
Ambush bar. (Alan Lowery, founder and owner of the 1970’s Leatherneck bar, and I had in 1974
tried to buy what is now the Lone Star space, but the large extended Mexican family who owned
it as a cantina wanted to keep it for their family weekends.)
At that time, Joan Didion wrote in her seminal 1960’s novel, Play It As It Lays, people
(and facts) are swept up into history, and can be swept away by history (and by politically-correct
revisionists) if they don’t write notes, take pictures, collect drawings, and shoot movies–all of
which pop culture scholars do, so that Bearstream efforts like Les Wright’s The Bear History
Project and books like Bear Book I and II can exist accurately, and the contributors–David
Bergman, Ron Suresha (Chapter 27), Elizabeth Kelly, and Katie Kane (Chapter 29)–can keep gay
life from slipping through the cracks of history.
Pertinent to Robert B. Marks Ridinger’s Chapter 13 which depicts how the paws of bears
straddle diverse worlds, and paralleling Larry Toothman’s Chapter 20, a history of localized
bears, a prefatory remark needs to be made of a pioneering bear(ish) club. In 1972, a gentlemanly
gang of men–fronted by 250-pound Ursus Ed Linotti, Tony Perles (both Harley-Davidson
owners), Frank Gonchar, Bob Cato, all-told nearly twenty of us–founded the first San Francisco
uniform club, the Pacific Drill Patrol (PDP). In the 70’s grooming style of cops, football pros
(Terry Bradshaw, John Matuzak), and bodybuilders (like Ur-Bear bodybuilding brothers, the
heavily moustached Mike Mentzer and Ray Mentzer), the PDP featured moustaches for all
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
members and favored members genetically endowed with body size and body hair, particularly
the kind “that grows up thick around the neck of a white teeshirt,” as in one of the first bear
stories coded in a nonbear magazine, “Officer Mike: SFPD’s Finest,” a hairy Italian cop with
drawing by REX, Skin, Vol. 2 #2, November 1980, and again in Just Men, Vol. 1 #4, May 1984.
Foreshadowing Laurence Brown (Chapter 2: Fat Is a Bearish Issue), the Pacific Drill
Patrol practiced a Bearstream fetish we called “Padding Out” whereby average-sized guys,
inventing “prosthetic make-overs,” tied sleeping bags around our waist and torso with rope
strategically placed to define the mass; adding red-rubber hot-water bottles and canvas bags of
water over pecs and shoulders so the bulk would move realistically; wrapping foam rubber
around forearms and thighs; then climbing into huge-sized cop uniforms, fishing waders,
construction jackets, rubber raincoats, heading out to walk through the midways of county fairs,
biker bars, and even MacDonald’s where, one time when Linotti, his 250 pounds padded out to
600 pounds, ordered french fries, the waitress took one look at him, sized him up, turned around,
and, no kidding, lifted the dripping wire-basket of fries and dumped the whole load on his tray,
so awesome did his size make his appetite seem to be. One of the only prosthetic make-overs to
turn “ugly-sexy” erotic on screen is the redheaded “Fat Dirty Bastard” in Austin Powers: The Spy
Who Shagged Me. The rockstar actor, Meat Loaf, turned another “padded out” performance in
the man’s movie, Fight Club, with a beefed Brad Pitt. As a coordinate erotic exercise, a 21stcentury bear could pad himself out with rolled-up bath towels under latex and leather, topped by
flannel, to, say, 400 pounds and go to Home Depot for some quality tool time and ask an actual
bear questions about plumbing. “Padding Out,” obviously, also puts one bear paw inside a
bondage trip, and another inside latex/rubber/leather.
TWO ESSENTIAL BEAR PHOTO BOOKS
ch
om
.c
er
Fulfilling Les Wright’s Bear History Project’s quest for Bearstream artifacts, the Pacific
Drill Patrol legal charter exists and bearish PDP photographs, taken in 1974 near the Russian
River, which has become the idyllic retreat space of Bears, will be available soon at
www.BearArchives.com. Characteristic Pacific Drill Patrol photographs of PDP uniform picnics
can be sampled on pages 16 and 34 in the coffee-table photo book, Jack Fritscher’s American
Men, published by Gay Men’s Press (GMP), London,1995.
So tied together in creating High Male-Concept are Les Wright’s Bear Book I and Jack
Fritscher’s American Men that the two books were reviewed together in Lambda Book Report,
May, 1997. Reviewer William J. Mann wrote, “It’s that celebration of masculinity in its rawest
manifestations that is celebrated here in Les Wright’s Bear Book and Jack Fritscher’s American
Men...these are images that could redefine what male beauty is supposed to be.”
GMP, now part of Millivres-Prowler, London, intended American Men as a kind of “Bear
Cult 2” to continue the archetypes of Beardom’s First Photographer, Chris Nelson, in his seminal
bear photo book, The Bear Cult, GMP, 1991. The pair of books, The Bear Cult and American
Men, are so absolutely important to the photographic genesis of the bear image that each is
graced with an introduction written by world-renowned British art critic, photographer, and bear
lover, Edward Lucie-Smith. History, even here, too quickly jumps from the 70’s to the late 80’s
and 90’s, but only at the expense of early Bear Culture. The Bear Cult, American Men, and all the
bear magazines and near-bear magazines, as well as The Bear Book I and II, and probably bear
culture as a distinct entity might never have emerged, or emerged so distinctly, without the
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
Ja
©
humanist men who nursed the Bear Roots in early gay culture.
Fortunately, with notebook and camera, I have publically lived with other artists an
artist’s life in gay culture and media. Personal photographs seem like public snapshots of history.
Memoir seems often the autobiography of that culture, written as a primary witness, as well as
written as a professionally trained critic and scholar of history. Celebrate! It is exactly that sense
of the personal, that appreciation of personal oral history, and personal identity, that makes Bear
Culture different from depersonalized gay culture with its hired, nameless models, and slick
magazines reflecting advertisers’ censorship, and awards corrupted by the fascists of the
politically correct. (Dr. Lawrence Mass, Chapter 1: Bears and Health, reveals his insights into
how the obstructionism of the politically correct can injure bears’ health.) Rejoice! The average
gay bear probably feels more like a person than the average gay man. (See John R. Yoakam,
Chapter 11: Parlaying Playmates into Lasting Friendships.)
FROM STEVE REEVES TO BEAR
ck
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
“Bears,” Michael Bronski tells Ron Suresha in Bear Book II, “did not come out of
nowhere.” The men who created the magazines, photographs, writing, and culture of the first
wave of gay lib in the 1970’s grew up on the happy post-WWII pop culture of athletic, can-do
masculinity. MGM’s1953 spectacle Quo Vadis featured a huge, half-naked bear-man named
Ursus in the Coliseum. Producer Joe Levine downloaded Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, and Demetrius
and the Gladiators into low-budget “gladiator movies” shot in Italy and spun out of Steve
Reeves’ beard, hair, and muscles usually opposed by an antagonist bear of thicker proportion and
shaggier of chest and head. (Drummer #19, December 1977) In American homes, for eight years
on the TV series Cheyenne (1955-1963), the square-jawed and shirtless Clint Walker weekly
bared his hairy chest, furry belly, and upholstered shoulders to mesmerized adolescent boys who
were about to come out in the Gay Renaissance of the 1970’s. See Drummer #27, February 1978,
and Clint Walker’s bank-heist movie, The Great Train Robbery (1969) which shows the True
North where gay bears were about to head after Stonewall.
As genome tributary to the Bearstream, Bob Mizer’s AMG studios in LA shot many
returning soldiers, smooth to hairy, from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, publishing them in
Physique Pictorial. Chuck Renslow’s Kris Studios in Chicago featured handsome, dark,
brooding men so non-sissy, so masculine, that the reader at that time wondered specifically, “Do
these straight guys know what the photographer is doing with their pictures, putting them in
magazines where other guys get hard looking at them?” In 1965, Avery Willard at Guild Press in
Washington, D.C. published a 70-page, hand-size photo book titled, Leather!, which featured
hairy men and used key Bearstream totem words, “lumberjacks,” “Davey Crockett,” “Daniel
Boone,” and hyper “masculinity at a full 6 on the Kinsey scale.” As a footnote, the opening
model, nonbear Gary Adams, is the actor Gary Lockwood who starred in 2001: A Space Odyssey
and in Kit Carson and the Mountain Men, 1977.
Complementing Ned Wilkinson’s Chapter 6, “A Bear Admirer’s Point of View,” Bear
Classic 5, March 2000, in the story “Mapping the Genome of Bear” invented a woof-way to
judge a guy’s essential bearness as a Bear. URSUS is the unit of measurement of BEAR the way
RICHTER measures EARTHQUAKES. So: judge a BEAR on a 1-10 URSUS SCALE. HALFURSUS (5). FULL-URSUS (10).
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
THE FIRST BEAR: LEDERMEISTER, FULL URSUS
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
In 1961, in San Francisco, in North Beach, at the beatnik bookstores, I stood, wearing my
big-kid first beard, awe-struck looking at the athletic masculinity of lifeguards in Young Physique
in color, and the muscular sailors in Tomorrow’s Man in black and white. By the mid/late 60’s,
Colt Studios, first in New York, shooting naturally masculine musclemen, with Clint Walker as
the platen, struck on the hairy model Ledermeister (Leathermaster) who was in fact the muscular,
very upholstered archetype of bear, Paul Garrior, from whom all later bears descend.
Paul Garrior/Ledermeister is the Ur-Daddy Bear who in real life was a lineman for a San
Francisco utility company. He appeared Full Ursus in Colt’s Gallery 5, 1971, and Manpower 5,
1972. Rip Colt/Jim French wrote in 1971: “Ledermeister is the Colt prototype...quiet but
extremely powerful. He works outdoors, lives simply...is very rugged and prefers surroundings
that reflect that quality...a loner who shuns parties and is happier on his motorcycle. He showers
daily, disapproves of deodorants and colognes and sleeps nude. If it’s masculinity that turns you
on, Ledermeister has it in spades.”
In 1972, in San Francisco, I shot two reels of Super-8 film of Paul Garrior sitting, boots
down in a manhole in the street, splicing cable with his gloved hands between his denim thighs. I
consider that bearish 2-reel movie to be the first motion picture shot by Palm Drive Video (then
called Spitting Image, with David Sparrow) which used Super-8 film for fifteen years until 1982
when video became possible. Paul Garrior was a god, an archetype, the Platonic Ideal of
masculinity. In media, he was virtually the first gay man to look like a man. He was a human
rebuttal to the straight stereotype of powerless effeminacy.
Digital bears looking back at history’s search for the genesis of the “Bear Face” can note
the second official Palm Drive movie, Cop Faces. Shot during the 1972 Gay Parade, Cop Faces
consists of tight close-ups of SFPD cops’ (faces only featuring big moustaches) standing on
guard on the route of the parade which continues on around their heads. I stood in front of each
cop and held the camera on his face as long as it took for him to break his official mid-distance
stare and glance with personal “fuck-off” attitude at the camera; now that’s radical film making
that breaks the public mask down to the personal face.
Actually, history’s memory of the 1970’s would be quite different if video-with-sound
had been the medium of a decade that was shot on silent Super-8 film on 4-minute reels! Not
long ago, a young lesbian asked me to show her on demand the video of the Stonewall Riots. She
was quite disturbed to find out that video did not then exist. Her point of view shows the
necessity of tracing Bear Roots, in the fashion of Bear Book I and II, in order to point out the
principle that most people think the world began to exist the day they first noticed it.
When Paul Garrior finally exited my bed in 1980, after a four-way with his lover and
mine, the hairy bodybuilder, Jim Enger, I saved the designer sheets, tan with two stripes, red and
green, and three years later, nearing the end of the shelf-life of fetish items, I brewed the sheets
into tea, and the PDP, at a formal supper, toasted and drank the essence of uniform-leathermuscle-bear masculinity: Garrior and Enger. (Mea culpa: “I am like so totally dedicated to
masculinity.”) Every tribe eats the god they desire. I confess. History for me is fetish. Accuracy is
obsession. Also early on in the 70’s, Colt hit on the ethnicity of Italian bear, Bruno, who was a
man adored on the streets of Greenwich Village. Palm Drive Video revived Colt’s Bruno in Big
Hairy Bruno, American Men, p. 52.) With the commanding Ledermeister and the cuddly Bruno,
Colt launched its alternately bearish-and-shaved history that by the millennium had landed Full
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
Ursus on Colt’s major-money Bearstream stars, Steve Kelso, Carl Hardwick, and Pete Kuzak.
(Bearophiles: Ledermeister, Best of Colt Films 7; Bruno, Best of Colt Films 8. All Colt films are
silent movies.)
COLT THROUGH A LENS DARKLY: TARGET
CAMERAS: HUNTING BEAR VS WYSIWYG
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
Les Wright’s Bear Book theme pursuing “the History and Evolution of a Gay Male
Subculture”evokes this oral history of the New York to Los Angeles bicoastal dawn of bears as
icons. When Colt, in the early 70’s left the dark lofts and cellars of Manhattan for the sunny
gyms and beaches of Los Angeles (1974), photographer Jim French during the 70’s created the
decade’s hairiest icons in Dan Pace (Dan Padilla) who was the real life partner of Colt model
Clint Lockner (Chuck Romanski), an actual LAPD officer, who was the former lover of my hairy
muscle lover, Jim Enger. In the words of Jacques Maritain, we were all friends together. In the
70’s, life was a cabaret, oh chum, and even the orchestra was beautiful! (Bruno starred with Clint
Lockner in the famous uniform-bear pas de deux, Lockner’s Key, Best of Colt Film 12.) When
Jim French split New York, his former Colt partner, Lou Thomas/Jon Target, started Target
Studios, and Lou’s own beautiful, cliche-breaking, bearish photographs ruled out of New York.
Thumbnail: Check the drawings of Rip Colt. The parting was so amicable that Colt mailed
Target’s first brochure.
So powerful are Lou Thomas’ leather and western images that his pictures still appear
regularly in magazines. Unlike Jim French’s wisely guarded copyright to Colt images, most often
Lou Thomas’ work is not credited either “Lou Thomas” or “Target Studio.” Bearophile hint:
When a magazine credits a photo as “From the ‘Its-Own-Name’ Archive,” it is virtually stolen,
or appropriated by a lazy editor who fails to research ownership. Lou Thomas is worldclass
example that every artist’s identity so violated is lost to history. Note that even Richard Bulger
who founded Bear magazine, found his intellectual property “appropriated” against his will by
other well-intentioned bears. Click on Caveat: The only “gay community” that exists is the one
that thinks all gay artists’ and gay writers’ and gay photographers’ work is community property
to be used despite copyright, credit, and permission. This year the reader might see a bear image
new to the reader that was actually created in 1970-1985 by Lou Thomas/Target. Because so
many of the authors in Bear Book II write about the personal moment they woke up in midBearstream and discovered “bearness,” remember what they’re discovering was produced
previously by someone else, upstream, working out universal male archetypes in writing,
drawing, photography, and video.
As Bear Book II traces the origins of bears, remember that “gay men” per se weren’t even
invented as an object of desire in anyone’s head until about 1972. No man had ever “come out”
to bed another gay man until gay media made “gay men” an attractive category. The gay ideal
had always been “straight,” even straighter than the present when gay personals ads still insist on
“seeking straight-acting, straight-appearing.” (See David Grieg, Chapter 10: The Ephebe Is
Dead.) Gay male identity did not burst full-blown out of Stonewall. The first liberated queers had
no idea such diverse ways of being gay would come out of the closet. The big surprise was that
not every homosexual was a sissy, a drag, or a sweater queen. We all walked around a bit dazed
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
ck
Ja
©
and confused, asking, Is that hairy, 6-3, 250-pound, bearded hippie man over there...gay?
The way fashion designers mimic the streets, gay media aborning reflected the streets of
Christopher and Castro. Early gay media was clogged with WYSIWYG gay stereotypes, because
the gay media, before Drummer went “grassroots,” saw only gay stereotypes of homosexuality
and not gay archetypes of homomasculinity. The gay stereotype managed to butch itself up to
leather, but the leather seemed on some an accessory. The more subtle flavors of
homomasculinity came out simmering slower in the hot boil of gay lib. Word was out: there were
“men’s men” who were gay. But, like bird-watchers, how to spot them? How to get them into
magazines? Cameras were the weapons of vice cops. Cameras at the first gay parades were a hot
debate. Cameras at the first gay rodeos caused some cowboys to wear an orange patch that meant
“No Photos.” The day after the Gay Rodeo, Reno, which I covered as a photographer with
reporter Randy Shilts for the Associated Press, newspapers across America published for the first
time (August 6, 1979) a first mass-media image introducing a “new” concept to straight
American popular culture: The Gay Cowboy. San Francisco Chronicle, First Section, page 3,
column 1. (The cowboy, who had consented to the photograph, immediately lost his job on a
ranch in Wyoming; a second cowboy ended up on the cover of MAN2MAN as well as the cover
of the fiction anthology, Rainbow County.) Up to the 90’s, cameras were verboten in a gay bar.
Fr
THE FIRST BEAR CONTEST
1989 EARTHQUAKE TOPPLES DOMINANT DRUMMER
om
.c
er
ch
its
Bearstream Note to Les Wright’s Chapter 19, “Bear Contests.” In February, 1987, Palm
Drive Video’s Mark Hemry and Jack Fritscher shot the first-ever video of the first-ever Bear
Contest, hosted by Bear John Muir, and sponsored by Richard Bulger at the Pilsner Inn bar on
Church Street near Market. The paranoia about the video camera ran high despite the fact that
since ten years before I was the well-known and trusted editor of Drummer. No patrons could be
photographed. The lights and camera could only be aimed at the stage, and only on the
contestants who had agreed beforehand to be taped. It’s a wonder any tangible history of early
Bear Culture exists at all. Such attitudes, based on fear of persecution, hampered the emergence
of bears, and have caused many digital cubs to think bears were invented in the 90’s when bears
finally became camera-ready. (Afterword: No bears were harmed during filming!)
Also, for years, much like Stewart Holbrook’s charming Chapter 5, “The Beard of Joseph
Palmer,” bears had been censored as “undesirable images” by the twinkie/clone media, and as too
“oppressively masculine” for the politically-correct “revolutionaries” who took control of the gay
male press during the decimation of plague that left empty offices with empty chairs and empty
tables. Bear men also hardly helped the photographic advent of Bear Culture by being shyer
themselves than a groundhog. It took an earthquake, October 1989, to shoot bears publically in
the street. Chris Nelson snapped the group photograph in front of the original Lone Star bar the
morning after the Loma Prieta quake. So historically important is the photograph that it is the
first photo in The Bear Cult.
Of the eleven men standing against the ruins of the Lone Star, three faces are basically
hidden or purposely deleted. That’s nearly 30% in 1989 obscuring their faces. On the other hand,
eight men boldly give “Bear Face,” with the most assertive, the Black Bear. Now Loading: Jason
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
Ja
©
Clark, Chapter 8, “One Black Bear Speaks,” and David Gan, Chapter 9, “An Asian Bear in
Minnesota.” On the 2089 centennial of the Loma Prieta earthquake, that Chris Nelson
photograph of bears standing in the ruins of the Lone Star will be displayed as an historical
artifact. (This from a professional analyst of gay pop culture.) That same earthquake’s damage
brought down the San Francisco house of Drummer. Publisher Anthony DeBlase put Drummer
up for sale, and the magazine, quintessentially American, was sold to the Dutch in Amsterdam
and lost its American sex appeal that so seduces the world that years before even Tom left
Finland for the USA. Original Fritscher Analysis: The sudden exit of dominant Drummer from
the San Francisco magazine scene set the stage for the new-comer rise of Richard Bulger’s Bear
magazine, started in 1987, and the bear-based publishing empire of Brush Creek Media.
ANTHROPOMORPHS: MEN AS ANIMALS
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Lou Thomas’s personal interest in the darker side of leather and fur found expression in
his Target take on what had been Colt territory. The Roman Catholic S&M priest, Jim Kane, had
introduced me to the hairy Lebanese hunk, Lou Thomas, in 1969, and I played with him regularly
in Manhattan until about 1975, but I only modeled for Target once (1970) in a set of black-andwhite stills with a 42nd Street/Times Square hustler. I suggested to Lou Thomas themes, which
later, as founding San Francisco editor of Drummer I was finally able to develop. These
Leatherstream themes (eg. cigars) became first articulation of archetypical gay themes that
continue to this day, some directly into the Bear Culture. In the early 70’s, at Target I suggested
pairings, such as “Tokers and Takers,” which was to be openly gay “Marlboro” men smoking
cigarettes as aggressive tops, as well as “Bulls and Bears,” an obvious pairing, I suppose now,
because of Wall Street, but I wanted to apply the anthropomorphism to strong masculine role
models to balance the anthropomorphism of the guy in the butterfly costume so loved by CNN at
Pride parades.
In The Target Album #3 magazine (1982 ), Lou Thomas requested and printed a new
overt Bearstream story titled, “Dirtiest Blond Contractor in Texas,” which he had illustrated
specifically to the text by Etienne. The story featured the hairy bodybuilder god, Kick, who was
the primary bear-man of desire in Some Dance to Remember, the 1990 novel of gay history,19701982, that The Atlantic Monthly reviewed as a “classic,” and critic Michael Bronski called: “A
mammoth saga of gay life...the erotic psychology of how gay men (leathermen, musclemen,
pornographers) live and love.” Firsthand, January 1991.Completed in 1984, Some Dance to
Remember fought for six years to be published, because the book was not about a sensitive soul
coming out politically correct and dying of HIV. Much more satiric, muscular, and bearish than
that genre, Some Dance to Remember is a fast read with fifteen principal characters and eight
story lines. The protagonist is pointedly named after the Ursa Major Bear Constellation, Orion:
Ryan O’Hara. His first lover is named “Teddy” and in physical description looks like biker-bear
David Sparrow. One main theme is what happens to an extremely handsome, extremely hairy,
dropdead blond bodybuilder who grooms his fur and grows himself so big, so huge, that he
wonders if his human soul can fill so much new manimal flesh. Thumbnail: Go to
www.BeefyBoyz.com and click on “Wanna Get BIG?” Link to www.MuscleBear.com and
www.MuscleBearz.com.
THE FIRST BEAR ARTISTS: NYC’S A. JAY & DOMINO
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
At the dawn of the 70’s, the very furry artist A. Jay (Al Shapiro) was art director for
Queen’s Quarterly in New York. A. Jay featured fur in his very popular cartoon strip, “The
Adventures of Hairy Chess,” which moved from QQ when A. Jay moved to San Francisco to
start-up art direction on Drummer which had also moved to San Francisco, escaping Los Angeles
after the Great Slave Auction Raid. The arrests that night at the Drummer fund-raiser put LA
leather’s leading artists, writers, photographers, and players behind LAPD bars. Fred Halsted,
whose leather films are in MOMA, quipped in his column in Drummer: “That crowded jail cell
holding tank looked like LA’s hottest leather bar.”
Influentially, in the mid-70’s, before artists like Bear magazine’ incredible H. K. Tuttle,
the first and original heavy-duty bear artist, Domino, was–like the martyrologist photographer
Arthur Tress (Drummer #30)–working the piers and streets of New York. Domino drew
hundreds of pictures of men now defined as bears doing bear activities wearing bear-associated
gear in bear-identified spaces. Domino’s context for his ursine men (hunting cabins, manholes,
toilets, Latin boxing gyms) is First Defining Look at “Bearspace” as theorized in Bear Book II by
Alex G. Papadopoulos, Chapter 12. Back then, before “gay space” was commercialized into
designer playrooms, Fred Halsted marveled at how easily gay men made do: “A garage with the
light on is just a garage. With the light out, it’s a fuckspace.” Drummer #20.
Domino’s first Bearstream drawings were completed in 1975. His earliest shows,
“Domino: Original Drawings and Prints,” were exhibited at Stompers, New York, December 15,
1978, and at the opening of Robert Opel’s Fey Wey Gallery, San Francisco, March 25-April 2,
1979. Robert Opel, who was a photographer of nasty bikers, and a writer for Drummer, is most
famously remembered as the naked man who streaked the 1974 Oscars. He was murdered, July 9,
1979, in his gallery, 1287 Howard Street, in a plot that spun out of the assassination of Harvey
Milk and Mayor George Moscone, but that’s a private story not appropriate for Bear Book II.
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE SHOOTS BEARS
om
.c
er
Click on Kelly-Kane, Chapter 29, “Discursive Construction of Gay Masculinity.”
That March 25, 1979, the opening at Fey Way also exhibited Robert Mapplethorpe and
several of his San Francisco photographs of leather and mouth-pissing that later were put on trial
in a First Amendment battle about gay culture’s freedom of expression. Page through any of
Mapplethorpe’s beautiful coffee-table photo books as part of any study of the emergence of Bear
Culture, because, legend that he himself was, Mapplethorpe found time to formalize a few
Bearstream men. Click on Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera, whose title is a twisted
homage to Christopher Isherwood’s I-Am-a-Camera memoirs of decadent Berlin, because the
nonfiction book is a memoir not only of Robert Mapplethorpe, but of the wildly decadent times
in which we conducted our bicoastal affair.
Historians may note: Mapplethorpe: Assault is nonfiction companion volume to the
novel, Some Dance, which is dedicated to Mapplethorpe. Unlike the present when everyone is
taking pictures, writing, and publishing off their desktop, in the 70’s, few were doing anything
but sex, so it was not easy to fill a magazine off a manual typewriter. Under such circumstances,
actually, I wrote and shot virtually twelve whole issues of Drummer to fill its pages from October
1977 through December 31, 1979. Particularly, Drummer needed covers: hot, real, truthful! I
wanted the face on the magazine to reflect not models but the faces of the grassroots readership.
For Drummer #24, I sketched the posture and cast the model, my bearish NYC S&M pal Elliot
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
Siegal, whom Mapplethorpe then shot in New York. So, on Drummer #24, I produced
Mapplethorpe’s first magazine cover, September 1978, the Bearstream icon, “Authentic Biker for
Hire.” The cover copy over the Mapplethorpe photograph read “Sexstar Richard Locke.”
LORD OF THE BEARS
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
So far, so good. Thinking I’d put my two best lovers together, I scheduled Mapplethorpe
to shoot the blond bodybuilder, Jim Enger, who looked like a man’s man version of the very
bearish young Robert Redford who himself was so hairy of chest and torso he was featured in
Drummer #1, June 1975, playing the biker-bear title role in Little Faus and Big Halsey. Jim
Enger, with his CHP moustache, grooming, and physique was the Lord of the Bears. (There is a
California Golden Bear Physique Contest at the California State Fair each year.) Jim Enger had
grown his golden body fur to its full 1.5 to 2 inch length. What a scene! My two friends. One was
a star in front of the camera. The other was a star behind the camera. Papal diplomats never
performed better than I that day! The shoot turned out glorious black-and-white as well as color
photographs, because the voyeur Mapplethorpe needed the exhibitionist Enger, and vice versa,
and therein rose my power as producer to get them beyond personality and into the work.
Jim Enger–when Jim French of Colt, shot him–posed frontal. However, Jim Enger
refused to sign a frontal release, even though he had a large national endowment. Enger’s
vascularity, definition, and sheer muscle-mass looked so good stuffed into a pair of two-ounce
nylon posing briefs, who of the judges and audience ever noticed his cockring pushing his full
monty toward the footlights? The demanding Mapplethorpe, pleased by the full frontal
photographs, but ticked a bit by the commanding Enger’s reluctance to sign a model release
before he had seen the actual resultant photographs, soon published a four-color greeting card of
Jim Enger’s big dick and massive furry blond torso, neck to thighs, head cut off. Perfectly
spinning, the perfect moment of that Mapplethorpe image of Jim Enger is the First Formal Bear
Photograph, 1980, seven years before the first appearance of Bear magazine. Robert gave me a
number of the large black-and-white photographs and they are perfection.
JIM ENGER, TOM OF FINLAND, DOMINO, & RICHARD LOCKE
om
.c
When CHP/USMC doppelganger Jim Enger was still the lover of actual LAPD cop,
Chuck Romanski (Clint Lockner), Tom of Finland made a drawing based on the two of them
together in uniform–so absolutely iconic did Tom of Finland judge Romanski and Enger who
were the toast of El Lay and the height of the Platonic Ideal during the Gay Renaissance, 19701982. Tom of Finland confirmed my written and photographic takes on Enger as the most desired
man on Castro. (See American Men, page 12, Enger Winning Contest.) So did Domino, who
in1981, in my bedroom in San Francisco, drew Jim Enger in CHP uniform seated smouldering
on a portable toilet chair. In that fit, nonfat era, Jim Enger was the First Muscle Bear. In
association with Drummer, Domino also drew gay porno’s First Daddy Bear, Richard Locke, star
of the Gage Brothers hirsute blue-collar Super-8 double feature which, featured in the pages of
Drummer, influenced hugely the emerging homomasculine consciousness. See Kansas City
Trucking Company and El Paso Wrecking Company, which in 2000 begat Big Bear Trucking
Company. Type in www.ToughCustomers.com: Click on the bears of The Domino Video
Gallery, 2000.
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
OLD RELIABLE: BLUE-COLLAR EROS
NAME THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT...
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
Early on, Jim Stewart, who had moved out from the Midwest with David Sparrow and me
to our 25th Street commune, began shooting his Folsom Photographs documenting “Men South of
Market.” I produced his first Leatherstream photographs in Drummer #14 (May 1977), Drummer
#16, and Drummer #18. In June, 1975, Jim Stewart introduced me to David Hurles, Old Reliable.
A versatile entrepreneur, David Hurles shot a museum’s worth of black-and-white photographs,
color transparencies, Super-8 films, and taped audio recordings of backstreet boys working out of
the Old Crow hustler bar on Market Street and the Tenderloin. His young, tough-guy cons–way
harder than Bob Mizer’s at AMG–were graduates of trailer parks, carnival midways, and juvenile
halls of the American South. Gay magazines totally rejected Old Reliable’s work, but I saw
genius that I pasted directly into perhaps the best-ever single issue of Drummer #21, March 1978.
Old Reliable was a hit. Readers ate him up. His photographs in 1977 created more sensation than
Mapplethorpe who wasn’t famous until the late 80’s. His outlaw boys scared men into orgasm.
“Never invite them,” Old Reliable warned, “into your lovely home.” As a man and an artist, he
himself confessed about his tattooed scooter trash and bearded ex-cons, “Terror is my only
hardon.”
Old Reliable photographed, and employed for cash money, literally thousands of
homeless street people in this order: straight, bi, and gay. He shot men of all types as long as they
were tough, had attitude, could smoke cigars, and knew choke holds. Old Reliable’s gift to
nascent Bear Culture was that his bearded, hairy men introduced hillbilly blue-collar glamour
into the homomasculinity of the Bearstream. David Hurles still is Old Reliable. His legend was
made, when in 1983, as David said, “The French are coming with a camera crew to interview me
about my work.” From Drummer, David Hurles’ Old Reliable photos for years filled complete
issues of magazines titled Skin, Just Men, Inches, often with my homomasculine stories printed
alongside his photographs.
Bearstream Guide: Look for the Bear Roots of images and stories in the diversity of
vanilla Gaystream magazines that began appearing in 1981. In the 70’s, photographer Crawford
Barton shot the occasional fat hairy hippie man as published in Drummer sibling, The Alternate
#8, January 1979. Leather-Bear-Cigar photographer Greg Day has long featured hypermasculine
men including Castro Street shots of his once-upon-time college roommate, Jim Enger. Click on
Greg Day’s photographs at www.ManDreams.com. Also, the diversifying photographers, Kristen
Bjorn, who appeared in Bear as early as the first six issues, and Max Julien of Marcostudio, have
for years specialized in importing uncut Latin musclebear images from Brazil.
All these Ur-springs of the Bearstream trickled along because in the invention of
“gaymen” and “gay culture,” ideas and concepts required the invention of a new vocabulary to
describe categories and sub-categories inside the love that so long had dared not speak its name.
Writing Drummer was an exercise in creating words (vocabulary) to describe what never had
been written or even spoken before, but that’s what pioneers do, just as Adam, in the archetypal
story of Bible folklore, woke up and found his job was to name everything. Suddenly, in charge
of the most original and powerful grassroots magazine in gay history to date, I had to create
words and concepts: homomasculinity, sensualist and mutualist, man as a prefix, “Second
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
Coming Out” into fetish, etc. In the same way, Les Wright commissioned the authors in Bear
Book II to invent words, such as I coined originally for this analytic history: Bearstream,
Leatherstream, Gaystream, Manstream, the Ursus Scale, Anthro-Morph, and morph as a new
category of live bear.
MAGS, BOOKS, & ’ZINES, OH MY!
SIZE RULES
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
In the 70’s, magazines ruled gay culture. Confer Bear Book II, Chapter 27, “Bears in
Literature and Culture.” Most publishers of gay books emerged only after HIV, later in the mid80’s, as if suddenly there was time to read more than a magazine. Also, because books carry
gravitas in American culture, lesbigay historians, themselves writing in the genre “books,” often
ignore the vital import of the genre “gay magazines,” as if magisterial books last forever, and a
dirty magazine only thirty days. Ironically, gay culture’s literary awards fail to even have
categories for magazine literary excellence. Sociologically, there is more gay verite for the
researcher in the features, photos, and personals of gay magazines than in all the gay coming-ofage books in the world. I champion gay magazines because magazines traditionally responded
quicker than books to pop-culture mood swings. Long before the first book on bears, there were
bears in magazines. Magazines are radical in the literal sense of the word radix, which means
root, because magazines show the grass roots of what actual people think and desire. Actually,
exactly like the first gay magazines (hand-made, folded, stapled), Personal Pages, homesites on
the internet, have become the new gay magazines of grassroots identity and desire: do-it-yourself
photo layouts, fantasy fiction, true confession, even banner advertising. Overnight,
www.BearStream.com sites and links infinitely outnumbered the dinosaurs of tree-pulp
magazines and books. Click on www.HuzBears.com.
By Drummer #30, the fourth anniversary issue, I had included a High Concept on the
masthead. Because I believe you can make Tinker Bell live, I stretched the Drummer concept by
subtitling it: “The American Review of Gay Popular Culture.” The importance of Drummer in
the Gay Renaissance of the 1970’s cannot be overestimated. Drummer, with no competition, was
the Bible of gay culture at the time, with a press run, according to publisher John Embry, in 1979
of 42,000 copies each issue. Consider that the average year-2000 press run of the very successful
Bear magazine, competing in a crowded bear market, was 20,000+ copies. Most gay books have
press runs of 2,000 to 5,000 copies total. Casting about for themes, verbal and visual, I wrote the
first article ever on cigars (Drummer #22, May 1978) as a gay erotic fetish and then watched
cigars come out in gay public spaces where no cigar had gone before. Twinkies ran. Cigars were
a way to separate the men from the boys. Cigars have become an accessory of bears. That’s how
the mix of fetish works. For the sake of Dr. Lawrence Mass, Chapter 1, in that first article on
cigars, I defined the difference in tobacco use between a fetish (cool) and a habit (not cool).
Click on Laurence Brown, Chapter 2, “Fat Is a Bearish Issue.” In the 1970’s the most
used gay drug was actually steroids. They were new. They were sexy. Huge bodybuilders like
Arnold appeared in Pumping Iron (1977). American men, straight and gay, all want to grow
bigger. American parents always describe their sons by height and weight, as if being 18, 6-2,
and 200 pounds is a way, like money, of keeping score in America! In 1979, a man pumped up at
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
om
.c
BLUE-COLLAR BLUES
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
the gym all week, because come Saturday night without pecs you were dead. First came the oral
steroids, then the injectable, which along with speed, suggests that needles, more than sex, killed
off the dropdead A-Group. (Bummer!) The lust for body size was so huge that the “pursuit of
bigness” is seminal plot line in Some Dance to Remember. In fact, the main bear theme, and
musclebear theme in the novel is the ordinary gayman’s pursuit of Physical
Identity–bigness–which has become homomasculinist signature of bear culture, and masculinist
American pop culture of WWF, NFL, and Sex in the City’s Mr. Big. In the year-2000 musical
play, The Full Monty, based on the movie, and written by gay playwright Terrence McNally, the
loveable “bear” character, “Dave,” sings in the first act the song, “You Rule My World,” to his
tummy. The Full Monty, film and musical, is about the physiques of ordinary men who gain selfesteem through feel-good masculine exhibition.
“Dick Size” is absolute: even with a vacuum pump, a man has what he has. Body size is
relative along the genetic lines of Sheldon’s somatotyping: ectomorph (lean), endomorph
(medium), and every bear’s favorite, mesomorph (just right). Bearophile Note: While a man can’t
make his dick bigger, he can make it smaller. Every thirty pounds of fat (not muscle) over normal
body weight takes ½ inch off dick.
“Body Size” to contemporary bears is a huge fantasy on the internet where any number of
bear-linked websites actually “morph” photographs digitally to add huge shoulders, massive
pecs, tiny waists, giant quads, and big guns. (Interestingly, the heads all stay the same size.) Click
on Greg’s “Morphs” at www.BeefyBoyz.com. Try to translate the 21st-century shorthand of Size
Rules, reminiscent of the arcane symbols in Physique Pictorial, that reps a young fireplug of a
player making himself available first by email at www.MuscleBear.com: 5-6, 195, 48c, 34w, 18a,
25q, 16c, 18.5n, 14fa. He doesn’t need morphing. He’s a live “morph” like the live “morphs”
seen at Bear Gatherings. The Hun is the Leather-Bearstream artist most noted for “morphing”
men in his hand-drawings into huge lumberjacks and musclebears long before the e-morphs. See
Hun books and Hun Video Gallery: Rainy Night in Georgia. Early on, Britain’s Bill Ward,
cartoonist for Drummer, caught the wave and made his leather bikers increasingly bear, all the
way to Full Ursus appearing in Bear itself. The LA artist, Jakal, from the early 70’s on always
drew his men, especially his handballers, as hairy beasts. REX drew the very polished poster and
advertisement for the new Lone Star, the saloon of choice for bears.
Les Wright’s Bear Book II dives to the heart of the politically correct controversy about
bears who by nature and humanist philosophy are not usually politically correct. Les Wright
himself backs out of political infighting at www.BearHistoryProject.com where he writes that
ideally bears are apolitical and human, humanist. Many latter-day saints of the politically correct
condemn all words and images of bears and of the 70’s as being authoritarian and oppressive.
Not! Those words of the first wave of Gay Liberation were offered as trial balloons trying to
invent gay identities. No one got authoritarian until the PC 80s when to justify their jealous
politics they failed Logic 101, made the post-hoc-ergo- propter-hoc fallacy (what-came-beforethis-caused-this), and claimed that 70’s culture caused AIDS. A virus caused AIDS. Not
Drummer. Not sex. Not the innocent men on the streets of NYC, SF, or LA. After 2000 years of
being in the closet, a decade of celebration really doesn’t seem like indulgence! Except maybe to
the New Puritans: the politically correct. Intellectually, the lesbigay fundamentalist politically
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
BEAR SPACE TRAINING CENTER
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
correct connection of HIV to gay culture is wrong in the same way that Right Wing Republican
fundamentalists are wrong about gay culture. Period. Burn me at the fucking stake, but the
politically correct are mortal enemies foisting the agenda of failed Marxism/Communism on
lesbigays living in a capitalist society that gives everyone a chance. No less a bear and gay
culture maven than Richard LaBonté wrote in The Advocate #599, February 17, 1992: “Political
correctness is an over-the-top attitude any au courant cartoonist is duty-bound to skewer.”
Cartoonist rhymes with humanist.
The politically correct make this “thing” out of “working class” which is a reverse
bragging that bears have to think about in fetishizing working-class men, jobs, and gear.
Actually, when watching whining politically correct faces on PBS claiming they themselves are
working class (“because they collect unemployment”), I think: “Who doesn’t work? Who isn’t
working class?” Many people have this ironic stereotype that gay men don’t work at the same
time that gay men’s archetypes of desire are of workmen. What if a man gets a job doing his
fetish? Paul Garrior, Colt model, was a real lineman. While there are “professional
homosexuals,” it nevertheless remains difficult to get a job as a bear.
A uniform bear could be an actual cop, deputy, or at least security guard, like the famous
redhead Bob Cato, who trained many a San Francisco bear out of the Pacific Drill Patrol. Once,
leaving my leatherbear ranch, Cato drove his van straight into a taxi carrying actresses Mary
Martin and Janet Gaynor, killing Gaynor’s press agent. For crashing into Peter Pan (Mary
Martin) and Janet Gaynor, winner of the first Oscar ever for Best Actress, Cato, the cop groupie,
did his time in the penitentiary, living the other side of his wild desire for cops, in cages with
biker bears and convicts and big beefy guards. Be careful what you jerk off to, you may get it.
(An orgasm is a wish your heart makes.) Cato wins the award for most living his bear fantasies in
the history of bear culture, and I got to live it too, visiting him Sundays at the prison which for all
gay fantasy is no place anyone should ever want to go.
om
.c
er
In terms of Bear Space, Cato’s kind of bearish cop-prisoner fantasy is best played out at
the Academy Training Center outside Atlanta where bodyguards will imprison you in a private
prison with real cops and real pro-wrestlers as guards who will turn bear-baiting inside out
through bondage, breath control, cigars, and “no-sex” that is so totally erotic you can jerk off to it
for years. See Drummer #145, December 1990, “The Academy: Incarceration for Pleasure.” In
1989, I coached Chip Weichelt into editing his first videos out of his cells’ security cameras
which I named at the time a whole new genre. That style finally arrived overground as the netcam
genre on the internet. In fact, the Training Center’s first video feature, I titled Atlanta Knights
and changed the lead cop’s grooming from nonbear to bear, making sure he grew a moustache
and showed his torso hair which he had to stop shaving. As a bear, Dave Munroe grew to so
popular a star in a non-sexual role, he was hiring himself out in almost full-page Frontiers ads as
a dominant no-sex bear cop with uniform and gun in LA to gentlemen of appreciation. That
raises a couple questions. What’s a live bear model worth in dollars, yen, marks, and pounds?
And if you see a terrific bear for hire, why shouldn’t you rent him? The 1990’s porn model, Tom
Katt, first appeared shaved clean, and then renewed his career with one of the most marvelous
pelts ever seen on screen in Leather Obsession, but did that make him a “bear”? On the other
hand, Donnie Russo, who shaves what fur he has, seems a “bear” to many.
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
BEAR DADDY: MAKING A VIRTUE OF NECESSITY
MAN2MAN SETS TONE FOR BEARISH 1980’S
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
In 1978, impressed with a foreign film titled In Praise of Older Women, I made fetish of
dealing with the fact that older men in the pages of Drummer would reflect the gay population as
it grew older. I produced Richard Locke’s interview in Drummer #24, because as the breakout
star of the Gage films, Locke was a personality to hang a concept on. I remember the interview
started, “Now that you’re all of 37, what’s going to happen to you and your film career?” Richard
Locke’s frame of reference was “bear.” He termed Kansas City Trucking co-star Fred Halsted a
“teddy bear.” Locke went on to success after success, moving up to the Russian River, which is
sacred bear territory ritualized each years by any number of bear weekends. When Richard Locke
wrote his autobiography, he gave me the manuscript to read and I sent him along to Winston
Leyland at Gay Sunshine Press. Richard Locke, the people’s bear, became an AIDS activist,
sometimes videotaped and broadcast on network TV crossing back and forth across the Mexican
border loaded with anti-HIV drugs for distribution in San Francisco. That pretty much describes
the true heart of a bear.
Just as Dr. Thomas McCann, Chapter 28, “Laid Bear,”describes bearish details in fiction
in a variety of gay magazines, Drummer continued the Whitmanian drumbeat rhythms of
American masculinity and homomasculinity that would eventually allow bear and bearness to
merge as shield emblems and totems of gay masculine-identified homosexuality.
(Homomasculinity defines the concept of men liking masculine men. The old dystopic term,
homoSEXuality, focuses on the act of sex.). As Les Wright says in Bear Book II, I wrote in
Drummer, “A homomasculine man has more in common with a straight man than he does with a
female-identified/Streisand-identified homosexual.” You can do your “mother’s act,” or you can
do your “father’s act.” Bear identity is a celebration of the best things in masculine identity:
archetypes of strength and warmth; not stereotypes of stone-cold violence. Bearness is nothing
more or less than actual male bonding. Attempts to categorize bearness are interesting academic
exercises, and worthwhile, but bears are really like “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”
om
.c
By the time 1979 turned into 1980, I wanted to exit the decade dropping stereotyped ideas
in media of what homosexuals are, and move into the archetypes of how homosexuals see
themselves personally. I moved my Drummer work into new magazines, specifically,
MAN2MAN, which, as it turned out, almost as a masculine manifesto, set the tone of
masculinity and bearishness for the 1980s. MAN2MAN was an international quarterly that lasted
eight issues from 1980 to 1982. I wrote it. Mark Hemry published it. Mark Hemry is the blond
bear with Buffalo Bill hair I met under the marquee of the Castro Theatre at Harvey Milk’s
birthday party, Tuesday, May 22, 1979, the night after the White Night Riots set fire to fifteen
police cars outside City Hall. We have been married bears since, living in the woods for twenty
years, with beards like ZZ Top. MAN2MAN was first mentioned in Drummer #30, June 1979,
page 18. In Touch immediately reviewed MAN2MAN as a major masculine event in gay
publishing.
For Father’s Day, the June 1981 In Touch #56 published the first article on “The Daddy
Mystique” in which my column headline reads: “In Praise of Mature Gay Daddy Bears. Gay men
use their sex lives to fill in the blanks of their backgrounds. As the Baby Boom grows older, lots
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
THE FIRST MAG COVER TO HEADLINE “BEARS”
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
of Gay Babies have reached their own maturity. To make a come-on out of necessity, the barstreet concept of Daddy Bear/Baby Bear cruising makes a match on both generational sides of the
Daddy Trip.” This June 1981 use of the terms “Daddy Bear” and “Baby Bear,” as well as the
psycho-cultural analysis of the phenomenon was a first in mainstream gaystream culture, and a
hard sell to the editor, because In Touch has a demographic different from MAN2MAN and the
Bearstream.
But it was a lonely time: Drummer in 1980 dropped into a six-year coma, repeating
themes from my issues 19-33. (In October, 1986, new publisher, Anthony DeBlase resurrected
Drummer with issue 100, two months before the debut of Bear magazine.) Mark Hemry and I
were like monks illuminating manuscripts. MAN2MAN was created on an electric typewriter on
a kitchen table in the last two years before computers and video. Physically, cut-and-paste
production was an enormous labor in addition to the writing and design. Magazine distributors
refused to handle MAN2MAN, not because of content or pix, but because, get this, it was the
wrong size to fit the mag racks in book stores. Distribution of MAN2MAN was very grass roots:
subscriptions by mail, and distribution in major cities by friends and fans who sweet-talked local
bookstores into racking the hand-sized ’zine as a favor. The rest is history.
To this day, as an on-going homage to Bear magazine’s primal roots in MAN2MAN, the
personals in Bear magazine are named “Man-to-Man Personals,” continuing the rhetoric written
in MAN2MAN’s “Manimals.” Brush Creek Media’s other magazine, Leatherman,
acknowledged on the masthead of Leatherman #2 (June,1994) that its title came from the novel
Some Dance to Remember. So, seven years before Bear magazine, and six years before Drummer
revived, “MAN2MAN: The Journal of Homomasculine Popular Culture” was a cult hit. The
cover of the premiere issue of MAN2MAN featured the hairy torso of Jim Enger–plus his head,
with CHP blond moustache. That first issue also coined the anthropomorphism of “Manimals”
for the classifieds in every issue. A featured erotic article was titled, “Dogmaster.” Animal
references to chicken and hawks and sexpigs evolved to the Anthro-Morphs of the Bearstream
slowly. MAN2MAN #1 printed the word mountainman for the first time, and–perhaps for the
first time ever in a classifieds ad–the word bear was used as a discrete category all its own on
page 9: “BIG BEAR. Male, shaved head, hairy, masculine, open to spontaneous, inventive,
experimental scenes where all goes with Sensuality and Mutuality moving beyond labels.
Possible threesome with bearded, well-built lover. Bay Area.” MAN2MAN #3 featured a cover
shot by Mario Pirami of hairy bear Clay Russell who is still very much a bear pornstar.
For four years, Mark Hemry and I had total custody of bear incubation. One cannot know
the Bearstream of bear without considering the impact of MAN2MAN internationally and the
California Action Guide in San Francisco. Michael Bronski is correct in pinpointing bears
beginning in San Francisco. In fact, in the BEAR VS. BEAR Copyright War of 1987, when bears
started fighting other bears over the word bear as a trademark, I was called upon to point out that
as founding editor of the California Action Guide, I went on record as the first editor/writer to
spit out in print the actual word bear, as a category name on a gay magazine cover. Go to
www.Advocate.com and click on The Advocate #596, February 17, 1992.
WAKE-UP CALL: THE BIRTH OF BEAR RHETORIC
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
Five years before the first issue of Bear magazine, the first magazine cover using the
word “Bear” was the November 1982, California Action Guide: “BEARS: HAIR FETISH
RANCH”! The High Concept of Bear headlines appeared on that newspaper, sized the same as
the Bay-Area Reporter, over a cover photo of film director Wakefield Poole’s hairy model Roger.
On the same cover, another High Concept headline read: “BEYOND GAY:
HOMOMASCULINITY FOR THE 80’S!” My lead cover feature article was titled “Ambushed
in Manbush: Hair Fetish Confidential, ‘Hair-Balling!’”
This November 1982 California Action Guide article is to bears and Bearstream
development the clarion equivalent of what the June 26, 1964, Life magazine article was to
leathermen. The pioneering column lines read exactly in bold capitals: “HAIRY BEARS AND
BEAR-CHASERS: HUNTING IN THE TRUE HOMOMASCULINE PRESS.”
As a gay pop culturist, I wanted to alert readers by promoting “The Hirsute Club” also
known as the “Hair Club”created by Daly City Bob, age 28, who sold his early Bearstream
business to my friend, Veet Manu (a Sanscrit name he took in India meaning “Beyond Mind).
SoMa leatherman/biker Veet Manu published The Hirsute Stud Ranch Newsletter, whose tag line
was “The Club for Hairy Men Who Love Hairy Men.” In a personal letter, dated November 10,
1982, Veet Manu wrote to me: “I’m still operating in the red, but I have big plans and want to see
the club really expand...So many hunky guys belong. I think you’re right about throwing big open
parties...to recruit new blood.” In a personal letter, dated May 23,1983, Veet Manu wrote: “The
first Hirsute J/O parties begin this summer. Thanks for help with graphics and promotion.”
To publicize those parties, by summer 1983, in the California Action Guide, I published
six photographs featuring Ledermeister, two leatherbears from Target, and my “moustache”shot
of the Pacific Drill Patrol’s ultimate bear, the Sacramento cop, Clay Stacey. The three highlyrefined, beautiful drawings were by the Hirsute Club’s artist “KA.” The Hirsute Club’s
photographer and pencil artist was Joe Lembo with whom Palm Drive Video shared a very hairy
model, Chuck Longone, in the video, A Man’s Man: See Dick Cum, with John Muir. The Hirsute
“personals ads” use the same rhetoric written in all “bear personals” to date: bear, bear-gorilla,
mountainman, etc. The California Action Guide article teaser, “Ambushed in Manbush” pun,
was homage to the hippie-bear Ambush bar, whose owner, the Full Ursus David Delay appeared
in the Palm Drive video, Daddy’s Beerbelly in Bondage, under the screen name of “Sam Bush.”
My article was very progressive in its opening endorsement: “This Hirsute Newsletter of
fair-haired boys and dark, furry men is a fetish idea whose time has come.” The classifieds in that
same issue of the California Action Guide carried the bold ad: “HAIRY BEARS WANTED FOR
JO POSING. I’m good-looking, hot, horny, and VERY INTO MEN who dig their FUR and want
to share it.” A Bear Demographic First: Nearly 20 “bears ISO bears” personals ad appeared in
that 1983 article! Bearophile News Flash: Previously, on the cover of the September 1982
California Action Guide, I featured a special bear photograph of the hairy Hulk Hogan who was
so brand new he had not yet shaved off his thick curling pelt of dark-blond chest and belly fur.
Woof! Inside, with Hulk’s photos appeared another photographic study of facial hair: twenty-four
photographs of cowboys with moustaches. To study how the gay male image was changing
toward bearish homomasculinity, and how the early classified personals led to Chapter 17, “The
Bear Mailing List: Les Wright Interviews Henry Mensch,” see “Those Dirty Classifieds!” in Just
Men, Vol. 3 #1, January 1984.
MAN2MAN, the California Action Guide, and the Hirsute Club Newsletter all happened
in 1979/80 through 1983, and crashed with the plague, four years before Bear magazine rode to
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
the rescue of the Bearstream in 1987. This is not to piss on territory, but is to give a time line
from both witness and causality. This historicity is one of the reasons publisher Anthony F.
DeBlase, after he resurrected Drummer, asked me in the summer of 1988 to “anchor” the first
leather history column in Drummer titled, “Rear-View Mirror.” Click on Drummer #125,
February 1989, page 82. Additionally, in the creation of bears, Palm Drive Video, coming up in
1982 with the tag line, “Masculine Videos for Men Who Like Men Masculine,” was shooting
hairy, bearish cowboys at the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Elko, Wyoming, in documentaries
titled, Cowboy Beards and Moustaches (1986).
Ja
©
BEAR BOOK II THEORY: SHOW YOUR FACES
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
In November 1982, in the early rush of the Bearstream, the handsomely upholstered and
moustached Tom Selleck tangled with “Bear Art” in the pages of the National Enquirer. Selleck
was the very popular star of Magnum P.I., a TV series that was watched to watch bear/beefcake
Selleck–not plot. According to the Enquirer, Selleck filed an $8 million lawsuit against artist
Timothy Anderson whose obviously come-hither “bear” drawing of Selleck had been published
as a poster which the straight-laced actor rightly found too titillating: shirt open to below hairy
navel, one shoulder exposed with hairy pecs and furry abdominals, all topped by that big famous
moustache, that hair, those eyes, the lips that sound out that endearing voice that ultimately
played comedy so well in the Paul Rudnick film In and Out. Selleck illustrates the quandary
some gorgeous straight men must deal with: gay sex appeal, bear sex appeal. He has all the
secondary male sex characteristics that cause throbs to throb. In my treasure trove of hot stuff, I
have a copy of the forbidden poster by Timothy Anderson whose work, interestingly, seems
identifiable as a well-known bear artist.
Quintessential bear point: bearness is less about the genital sex act and more about the
celebration of secondary male sex characteristics on a social level that leads to sex. My career as
a photographer has been devoted to shooting beef, bulls, and bears, because these are the
“Anthro-Morphs” that most resemble mature masculinity and assert positive body types like
those grassroots bears exposing their bodies and faces at internet sites like
www.MuscleBears.com, www.MuscleBearz.com, www.BeefyBoyz.com, and all the Bear Ring
links. The world was not always so liberated.
In 1978, in Drummer, I invented a High Concept page called “Tough Customers” which
invited men to send in photos of themselves with their personals ads, because I wanted to create a
magazine that reflected the readers to themselves. Even before the advent of gay porn studios
flooding all the gay rags with modelles who do not reflect the readers, but potentially make the
readers feel bad about themselves, I thought the most powerful force in gay culture would be
actually real masculine faces, masculine bodies, masculine trips, because the masculinity factor is
what is missing in heterosexual society’s judgment and treatment of homosexuals who are by
definition men seeking men. At first, I had to berate the guys who sent in their photos with their
heads cut off, or masked. (Remember the “gay thing” about cameras well into gay lib.) The
concept was revolutionary: homosexual outlaws printing their own faces in a perversely new
kind of “Wanted” poster! (Stuff like that, the ability to “spin everything,” even the word queer, is
why homophobes absolutely fume at us.)
Historically, the first place ordinary, normal gay men showed their personal faces in print
was in Drummer. (All the other magazines used models.) This liberation opened up the
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
Ja
©
possibility of grassroots magazines like Bear whose heart and soul has always been the personal
faces of actual guys and not modelles. “Personality” is a key quality in the incredible lightness of
being bear. As David Bergman in Bear Book II makes a good and fair assessment of
photographer Tom Bianchi’s “look,” I don’t exclude fotography that turns a man into a svelte
modelle posing in deep shadows holding a hula hoop, but such “glamour fotos” seem a
pretentious parody against male nature. My “Tough Customers” was successful enough to spin
out as a magazine in its own right. There was a time, before video and before the internet, when a
direct lineage of gay magazines actually propelled Bear Culture. Physique Pictorial + Drummer
+ MAN2MAN + California Action Guide leads directly to Bear.
RICHARD BULGER: ENTER, PURSUING A BEAR
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Edward Lucie-Smith’s 1991 introduction to the photo book, The Bear Cult, begins with
Bear magazine. By 1995, Lucie-Smith deepened his first sense of Bear Roots in his introduction
The Bear Cult sequel photo book, American Men. As a player and scholar, sometimes I smile,
because I try to be neither ironic nor cynical. I read lines in Bear Book II like “I began to read
Foucault in 1979.” Well, I first tortured Foucault in 1976. Postmodernly, of course. Life is more
than unraveling six degrees of separation, but here’s one story line of Bear magazine.
In 1987, when marketing genius, Richard Bulger, contacted us, Mark Hemry recalls
Richard’s first words, “I’m modeling Bear on MAN2MAN.” What a complement! MAN2MAN
had been off the stands for five years. The MacIntosh computer had arrived empowering small
publishing. Richard Bulger’s “revival” was the start of compadre days at the salon that floated
back and forth from early Bear to Palm Drive Video. Richard Bulger was also a legit agent for
video actors. Most of the first Bear models in his Live Bear series were also Palm Drive models
who, because Palm Drive also shot much still photography, also began to appear in other
magazines, even crossing over to many of the late 80’s and 90’s Drummer covers, centerfolds,
and photo spreads. The Bearstream began to flow.
Within six months of Bear’s 1987 debut, Drummer #119, July 1988, with an issue titled
in large print, “FETISH FEATURE: BEARS & MOUNTAIN MEN,” displayed Bulger/Bear
discovery, John Muir, using 17 Palm Drive photographs to illustrate my lead feature article,
“How to Hunt Buckskin Leather Mountain Men and Live among the Bears.” Again, we were all
friends together. Two years later, June 1990, the cover and centerfold of Drummer #140 featured
the video bear from Daddy’s Tools, shot by Jack Fritscher to cover the lead feature article by Les
Wright, “The Sociology of the Modern Bear.”
The premier issue of Bear #1 looked exactly like MAN2MAN. The first and only
advertiser supporting the new magazine was Palm Drive Video and Fantasy Men phone sex. The
cover model and centerfold of the 24-page Bear #1 was John Muir, the archetype of bear, titled
“Best Bear,” as picked by Richard Bulger and shot by Chris Nelson, with additional photography
by David Grant Smith. The three videos advertised, shot immediately before there was a Bear
magazine, were John Muir/Mike Kloubec in A Man’s Man, Chuck Longone in See Dick Cum, and
Big Bruno in Big Bruno.
Richard Bulger, cueing himself off my coinage, homomasculinity, said in his own words:
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the roots of Bear–its growth, its visuals, its focus. I didn’t
start Bear to exclusively be a listing of personals for guys that like hairy/bearded men...that’s not
what the original image of Bear was. I also didn’t start Bear to exclusively be a showcase for
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
CHRIS NELSON: FIRST BEAR MAG PHOTOGRAPHER
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
great photos of naked, bearded men....I guess I started Bear because there was no media product
out there which addresses my sexual needs and interests as a hairy, bearded, masculine guy who
likes similar men. There was nothing out there with personality....I don’t look like the guys in GQ,
Advocate Men, Honcho...I am a man-loving man. There’s another side to gay media: the side
which Drummer, RFD...among others capture. You can feel the homomasculinity in these
publications [MAN2MAN]...where we have seen the promotion and development of sexual icons
for a gay culture...: leather, spirituality, metal, fur, sweat, piss, respect for nature. I’m not a faery.
I’m not a leatherman. I’m not a fashion follower...Something’s happening....My friend Al said,
‘Richard, it’s the Bear Experience and it’s as real as any other movement in gay men’s history.
You just happen to be documenting it and putting it together at the cutting edge.’ The Bear
Experience? It’s the lifestyle and choices of not buying into the gay media role models, because
we have bought the wider cultural identification of maleness.” Also, see Bear, Vol 2, Issue 6, page
23 as well as page 46 where my satiric piece, “Bear Deteriorata,” set out to define “the Bearness
of Being Bear” in this issue questioning, “Who or what is a bear?”
As quickly as Richard Bulger conceptualized the ’zine of Bear, imitators–also empowered
on new computers–flattered his genius in producing their own ’zines like Husky, GRUF, and
Southern Cumfort. Mentioned earlier, the artist, the Hun, who had been around in the 70’s, caught
the wave of Bear which matured his drawings by giving him the bear archetype. No longer was
“bear” suggested. The Hun drew hairy men who actually looked like bears. Fur and cigars ruled at
the Hun’s Shadynook Prison. The Hun’s work exists on page and screen in books and tapes like
the Hun Video Gallery 1 and 2. Oftentimes gay art looks like the therapy of mental patients, but
the Hun paved the way for the gorgeous drawings of artists whose work is legendary in Bear: Fran
Frisch (no relation), Steve Stafford, Dade Ursus, T. C., Rolando Merida, and Douglas to note a
few. Richard Bulger was the best kind of friend: he did real business as opposed to gay business;
that is he kept his word, he paid his bills, he treated the first nominated bears as people. His salon
reflected his personality: fun, easy-going, productive. Balancing Bear with Brahma, Richard
Bulger and his partner, Chris Nelson, resuscitated the mid-80’s collapsed under the tragedy of
AIDS, through the publication of Richard Bulger’s Bear magazine and photographer Chris
Nelson’s Brahma Studios. Richard Bulger sold Bear magazine in December 1994 to Beardog
Hoffman and Joseph Bean.
In 1987, Chris Nelson shot the proto-typical archetype of bear, John Muir, whose beard,
hair, body, and manly beauty define bear-masculinity in the first solo photograph–after Chris
Nelson’s own self-photograph–in the diversely cast The Bear Cult. The photograph was so perfect
that Palm Drive received permission to print it on brochures to cross-promote John Muir’s Palm
Drive video. Like genius Robert Mapplethorpe who spoke very little, Chris Nelson let his
photographs speak volumes. His photography was the first to introduce real range of race and age
and look. He took homomasculinity, ignored by the gay mainstream, and turned it into the
Manstream (no “i”) that is now known as Bear. Without photographs, there would have been no
Bear magazine.
In 1987, Chris Nelson shot me with my ZZ Top beard and a cigar (The Bear Cult, page
87), and Richard Bulger, who often listed me on the masthead as a contributor writing for Bear,
dropped me in my mountainman gear into one of the first Bear centerfolds. Fast forward here over
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
om
.c
LES WRIGHT ASKS: DAVID GRANT SMITH?
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
the fifteen years that Mark Hemry and I spent in summer encampments re-enacting the Indian and
mountainman period of 1780-1820 with straight blue-collar men in buckskins, and their hatchetthrowing wives, and all of us living happily in teepees, swimming in the creek, and singing under
the moon, so we could bring back the words, photographs, and mountainman culture to gay
magazines. (Little things say a lot: Rick Redewill, when he was opening the post-quake new Lone
Star, called Palm Drive Video, because he wanted to order the Mason jars with glass handles we
featured in our videos from our mountainman rendezvous.) Our aim was to conquer the gay
world’s heterophobia by showing how much masculine-identified gay men have in common with
masculine-identified straight men–as opposed to those two new politically correct breeds I’ve
dubbed, the male lesbian man, and the straight male queen.
Chris Nelson during the shoot worked as smoothly as Mapplethorpe, and with his
professional equipment created his own “perfect moment” frame to frame. He worked silently,
non-directively, having me move about, or simply “be,” while he climbed up a huge scaffold to
shoot down at my reclining body. I remember, when he was directly in front of me, kneeling
between my legs, bearing down for a close-up with cigar, he spoke two words, “More smoke.”
Like Mapplethorpe, he was also very generous with his work, giving his models large-sized fineart prints of photographs other than the photographs printed in The Bear Cult. The list of models
shared between Bear and Palm Drive include: John Muir (Mike Kloubec); Sonny Butts, Randy
Rann, Jason Steele, Vigilante, Russ Wade, Tex Waco, and Mike Cox.
Interestingly, Chris Nelson discovered the young Jack Radcliffe in 1989, The Bear Cult,
p.13. Jack Radcliffe remains Bear magazine/Brush Creek Media’s top icon and box office star,
followed by the Palm Drive bear who went to Brush Creek, Tom Howard, who at the millennium
was Bear #2 in sales reflecting popular taste. By 1983, and continuing, venues like Palm Drive
Video verite and subsequently in 1987 Bear magazine with its Live Bear video line, had become
safe-sex substitutes for actual sex, because safe sex was not that easily invented or practiced. All
sex was said to be dangerous. The camera for Bulger, Nelson, and Fritscher, as well as for many
of the models, was in many ways an erotic continuum that kept sex going through the safety of the
lens. Richard Bulger created Bear on a desktop MacIntosh, which allowed him facility of
production that had not been available to MAN2MAN seven years before. The electronic world
had changed. The sexual world had changed. The gay male image had changed.
All around the lifeboat of Bear was the titanic wreckage of AIDS and the arrival of the
technology of rescue: video and computer. Richard Bulger, with an open-door policy, was in a
very cordial sense a friend of the arts and artists as well as models. In his left-bankish studio,
which was his home in a remodeled storefront, he displayed many photographs. One was a blackand-white picture of a blond muscular man sitting right-profile behind a military foot-locker
trunk. Mark Hemry and I admired the photo so particularly that Richard Bulger arranged to
introduce us to the photographer, David Grant Smith, who is rightly of so much interest to Les
Wright, because David Grant Smith was a purely homomasculinist photographer, a street hunter,
capturing the “genus bear.”
The clock was ticking. David Grant Smith was dying, yet he welcomed the three of us to
his tiny apartment ablaze with sunlight so bright I’ve never forgotten how blinding it was and how
I feared the UV might be damaging prints of photographs sitting about. Richard helped guide us
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
CHICKEN HAWKS ENDANGER BEARS
om
.c
er
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
through David’s work. Hundreds of photographic prints appeared from drawers and files and
closets, all of hot bearish blue-collar men shot beautifully, but no “Blond-Behind-Trunk.” In the
course of tea and the afternoon, we picked out fifteen black-and-white 5x7 photographs of men
displaying the burly new look emerging after the first shock of AIDS. Even shooting guys
dropping their pants impromptu in alleyways, David Grant Smith was a genius at casting, at
composition, and at lighting mostly with dazzling sunlight. I wanted to telephone Robert
Mapplethorpe who with Sam Wagstaff had pronounced male photography collectible and
respectable in the 1970’s; but in San Francisco, Mapplethorpe’s “Manhattanization” raid of the
City was unfortunately not remembered kindly by any local photographers, including David Grant
Smith.
Finally, Richard Bulger said, “David! The blond-behind-the trunk.” David, who had been
observantly silent as his work spoke for itself, said, “There’s only three prints of that photograph,
Richard. I have one. You have one....” He hesitated as if in some great pain of parting. We, open
wide as history, looked at him who was dying. What our genuine interest promised moved David
to say, “They can have one. No one else. These will be the only three prints.” These were the days
when madness reigned because of anxiety, suffering, and death. David Grant Smith reached into a
large folder and pulled out the “Blond-Behind-Trunk.”
We urged him to sign it; he hesitated; then he smiled, still reluctant, and with his weak,
shaky hand, wrote his signature as “David Smith” in red ink as we wrote the check as if beauty
somehow has a price. One of the fifteen photographs was printed as a sepia of a cowboy sitting in
a chair in a fancy old-time brothel, looking down at his rising dick. The photo could have been
taken a hundred years before. Those David Grant Smith photographs were so seminal to the
genome of bear that several men shot by him later turned up, coincidentally, without our ever
seeking them out, in Palm Drive Videos: for instance, Jack Husky, Nasty Blond Carpenter video,
American Men, page 58, opposite John Muir, A Man’s Man video, “American Bear,” American
Men, page 59. Jack Husky made several videos for Palm Drive before he proved bears die. He was
accidentally poisoned by a batch of bad medicine that hit San Francisco one weekend killing him
while sleeping over at Bob Cato’s house above Castro. So also passed David Grant Smith. In a
1988 personal letter, Richard Bulger wrote: “Dear Jack, Here you are [your photographs] as well
as the rest of Bear #4. Crazy times. This move upstairs (469 Fillmore)! David died...and orders as
well as magazine production seem overwhelming...Need a vacation. I’ll talk to you soon...wish to
talk longer. Thanks for all your help. XXOO, Richard.”
Someone should write all this down. I can only connect some of the dots. The mainstream
gay media tried to stop the emergence of bearish diversity. For instance, in the annals of anti-bear
villainy, the hands-down winner as the bear movement struggled to begin, was magazine
packager, John W. Rowberry, who was a shazam video critic the minute gay video appeared.
Dedicated to chicken, Rowberry refused to give any bear-themed, mature-male video a good
review because it wasn’t stereotype girlyboy gay. I was longtime friends with John W. Rowberry
from his first days as office “boy” at Drummer. I told him, “You like ’em so young, if sperm
could act, they’d get a good review.” Single-handedly, Rowberry resisted the tide of the
Bearstream as I arm wrestled him all the way through the pages of Skin, Skinflicks, Inches, and
Uncut, where he continued to print the bearish homomasculine fiction I wrote for him, at his
www.JackFritscher.com
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL
www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html
FULL-BODY ROGAINEtm
ch
its
Fr
ck
Ja
©
request, to fill his mags. I wonder did he read it or only look at the column inches of text between
his chickie photographs? Historically, many gay magazines have been controlled by straight men
who prefer young blond girls and their transference in managing their packagers figures that gay
men coordinately prefer smooth, young blond boys. The concept of bearish men was a joke.
I once handed Rowberry in his office above the fetish-clothes re-sale shop, Worn Out
West, on Folsom a set of my photographs of Jack Husky who was so dropdead sexy at the time he
couldn’t walk down the street without men biting at the cuffs of his jeans. The imperial Rowberry
looked at the photos, and said, a line I’ve never forgotten, “I can’t give a good review to a balding,
bearded, construction worker with a beer belly.” He wouldn’t even look at the video, Nasty Blond
Carpenter, which has gone on to sell thousands of copies to Jack Husky fans. Rowberry equally
tried to stiff the very bearish, strutting Police Olympics video series because it was full of “the
enemy,” real cops, sheriffs, and deputies in documentary features titled, Cop Wrestling, Cop
Powerlifting: Bears and Bulls, Cop Boxing, Cop Tug-of-War. Gay criticism, gay reviews, gay
politics, gay exclusiveness often reduce down to just so much “bitter grapes” because “somebody
else was the homecoming king!”
Richard Bulger himself experienced the Full Rowberry who was indignant about what he
called “sexually excessive pornography on video.” He meant bears “getting down.” Richard
ignored Rowberry, but Rowberry–bound to more commercial and elitist gaystream video
studios–was dead-set on stopping the bear movement’s video rise. He loathed the video verite of
grassroots artists’ with personal visions putting diverse and real men on screen. Rowberry’s
choke-hold on video impeded the ability to do business for Richard Bulger’s COA Films, Adam
and Company, Altomar Video, SIRCO Video, and Palm Drive Video. Rowberry’s passing opened
the floodgates for bear videos which support the bear magazines which, because they are print in a
video age, cannot support themselves in a culture that views but does not read, valuing an 80minute “bear” video at $60, and an 80-page “bear” magazine at $7.95.
om
.c
er
Bear Book II references the diversity of the Bearstream and bear magazine publishing.
Curiously, bear publishing is all magazines; there is no particular bear-committed small press
publishing bear books. Les Wright and his Bear History Project point up the importance to gay
male popular culture of archiving and studying the Bearstream of such grassroots verite
magazines as American Bear, Daddy, American Grizzly, GRUF, Southern Cumfort, German Bear,
as well as the bear stories in MR (Manifest Reader which is Drummer’s successor), Big AD, Girth
and Mirth, Bulk Male, TRASH, etc. Will the plurality of bears go on forever? What could
possibly be “post-Bear”?
This digital millennium time predicts–yeah, yeah, yeah–that soon, all tree-based
magazines will exist only on-line, except, of course, for some future young radical boy-cub who
decides to go back to the kitchen table, type up his erotic masculine thoughts, fold the pages in
half, staple them, and...
©JackFritscher.com
–[email protected], June 20, 2000, San Francisco
www.JackFritscher.com